Root only redirect using .htaccess

Question

I have website content like

mysite.com/index.php

mysite.com/apps

Now I want to put a maintenance page so people who will visit to mysite.com or mysite.com/index.php will able to see maintenance page however visitors will go to mysite.com/apps or mysite.com/apps/index.php will not redirect to maintenance page.

I already tried these:

This is redirecting both root and subfolder to maintenance page.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/maintenance.html/$1 [R=301,L]

This is not doing anything

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} mysite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://mysecondsite.com/ [L,R=301]

Answer 1

According to the HTTP Spec the correct response to return would be a 503 Service Unavailable, and you should do this from / rather than redirecting.

You could use Bittrance's solution, it should work, although you might want to separate out the rules since you'll probably want to redirect index.php to / in the long run.

I would certainly discourage using a 301 redirect to point to a maintenance page, that would indicate that it is a permanent redirect rather than maintenance, if you must do a redirect I'd recommend using a 302.

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To summarise, I think the best solution would be to 301 redirect index.php to / since you'll want that anyway, and whilst you're performing maintenance, / should return a 503 (and you can still have a nice maintenance page there), it's just your PHP's job to serve it not htaccess.

Answer 2

Not sure I understand your question. Is there some reason you can't do:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(|/|/index.php)$ http://mysite.com/maintenance.html/ [R=301,L]

... or some similar limited rerwriterule?